Suggested particle solution, of volume vdb to blender volume to mesh to points

[prometheus]

Hi folks,

As we know, there is still no way to export particles from embergen to other software, I think Nick mentioned
in July 20, that alembic export of tha t was planned to the end of that year, but so far it seems it´s still no there.

No worries…I know it takes time and all that, it would be nice to have alembic particle export, or partio export perhaps ( Latest 2020 lightwave version imports that, though I do not have the lw version for it)

Anyway, I tested latest blender 3.1 alpha, there´s a volume to mesh modifier in there, that´s all it will do though, so I checked the nodal options, and yes…the geometry node has volume to mesh node as well…so then I thought about turning the mesh to points, and yes…there´s a mesh to points node in there as well.

So this means I can get a particle sim out to blender and turn it in to points, and the sequence works as well, but since it first converts to vdb volume, I don´t think it is able to provide the same particle density which is sort of the key thing…since you export to vdb that doesn´t care about that density, once back in blender converting the volume to mesh you get the interpolated volume mostly…and when converted to points it will get the data from that volume, so not an exact conversion of embergen particles to blender points/particles.

but you may get some sort of particle look from embergen fluids anyway.
Of course it won´t be able to cope with the huge amound of particles necessary maybe.

Anyway, for what it´s worth, could be useful for extra particle sparks anyway you need to have glowing together with fluid fire…if rendered in Blender.

[NickSeavert]

We have some ideas on this sort of thing to make sure particles can be exported to other tools one day. Thanks for the writeup!

[prometheus]

Thank´s

While interesting and welcome, I can see that having so many particles needed for good density in another software, would slow that software down immensly, and top of that the issue on what to render it with.

Blenders old sprite halo isn´t there anymore in later blender versions.

Lightwave handles that better with still an option to use sprites with old lecacy system, but that´s the rendering part, having particles to settle or be managed in partition properly with millions of particles would probably slow it down considerably as well.

I think I´ve managed to push Lightwave to 6 millions, but at that level it´s starting to become really slow.
3 millions perhaps and it´s decent but over that…not so much.

Here´s an old sample from 2012 of 3 millions of particles simulated in Lightwave with fractal textures on the velocity channels for the vectors, rendered with sprites, so pure lw sim and render not embergen.
3 millions of particles and fractal driven velocity vectors

3 million particles and velocity vector driven by procedural textures, Lightwave 11.

Then again if there was a good particle export that lightwave could handle by shear amount and just rendering and not having to deal with the actual simulation, maybe you could get 6-8 millions of particles to be managed decently.

Lightwave added partio particle support in Lightwave 2020, but I haven´t upgraded to that from 2019 since the current development of Lightwave seem to have stagnated or maybe unfortunately have come to an end.

How krakatoa does it I don´t know

Getting particle data in from other software would perhaps be more usuful, there may be workarounds such as cloing items on to the particles and let that do the job.
Usually you may not need that many particles, just enought to serve as fluid emission emitters with density and vectors.

Useful if you set up collsions with dynamic objects in lightwave and have it spawn particles on spot and on time upon collision, then transfer that particle data to Embergen for fluid creation, save out and back to lightwave again, or blender for that matter.

Not sure what vectorRayGen can do though.

[NickSeavert]

20 million particles used to render fine in our older build but our new renderer took a toll on this. Particles are still heavily experimental and the performance slowdown is noted and being worked on. We’re redoing particles anyway to make them more useful too.